Out Loud: Nathan Heller and Joshua Rothman on Élite Colleges

In this week’s magazine, Nathan Heller reviews William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” which argues that America’s élite universities, while pushing students to ever higher levels of achievement, have lost sight of the real purpose of education.

Heller and Joshua Rothman, who has also written about “Excellent Sheep,” join Sasha Weiss on this week’s Out Loud podcast to discuss the book. Rothman summarizes Deresiewicz’s indictment against the current system: “It makes students into careerist, anxious, hyper-ambitious, freaked-out narcissists, basically. And it makes parents Miss Havisham-esque helicopter parents who try to achieve their own self-actualization through the achievements of their children. And, he argues, it produces college graduates who have no idea how their lives make sense except within this narrow track of achievement.”

The argument, Heller comments, has been greeted with widespread agreement. “It is indeed a subject of concern,” he says, “certainly for a lot of students, but I think also, and perhaps even more, for members of some of the older generations, who look at their own college experiences and then look at the college experiences of their children, and who see an alarming discontinuity.”

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